Autonomous underwater navigation and control

Abstract

This paper describes the autonomous navigation and control of an undersea vehicle using a vehicle control architecture based on the Distributed Architeclure for Mobile Navigation and a terrain-aided navigation technique based on simultaneous localisation and map building. Development of the low-speed platform models for vehicle control and the theoretical and practical details of mapping and position estimation using sonar are provided. Details of an implementation of these techniques on a small submersible vehicle “Oberon” are presented.